The assignment floored me completely. I idled over it for an hour and then reported back that I couldn't see a story in the suggestion. "What suggestion?" said the city editor. The thing had gone from his mind. He was of the mold from which great men are made. Having said of anything "Let it be done" he at once felt not only that it was accomplished, but that he had done it himself. The matter never came to his mind again. At the moment I spoke to him he was already deeply engrossed in a scheme for a story computing the value of all the lobster salad sold in the City of New York, exclusive of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island, in a single evening. I have noticed that most essayists are like that. Their enthusiasms are intense, but not of long duration. It is just as well. After all, there probably is no great field for expression in the subject of penwipers. The essayist does it once in a fine spirit of frenzy and then goes on to something else. If he were faithful to the one theme there's no telling when he might exhaust his market. Sometimes I am inclined to distrust the enthusiasm of the essayist. Being a man much moved to write, he comes to be so sensitive that even a puff of wind will propel him into an essay. And then sometimes on dead calm days he will begin to write under the pretense that a breath from some far corner of the world has touched him. Perhaps it has. But then again it may be that he, too, is among the fakers. "It is time, I think," writes Alpha of the _Plough, in Windfalls_, "that some one said a good word for the wasp. He is no saint, but he is being abused beyond his deserts." But why is it time? Fabre has said some hundreds of thousands of good words about wasps, but even if he hadn't, whence comes the cry of "justice for the wasp"? The wasps themselves haven't complained. Nor is there much persuasion in what Alpha sets down. "Now the point about the wasp," he writes, "is that he doesn't want to sting you." Of still less moment to the world than the wrongs of the wasp are his motives and intentions. Any wasp who stings me will be wasting his time if he lingers around after the deed to explain, "I didn't want to do it." Still, the whole trick of the essayist is to pick side-alley subjects. Selecting at random from _Windfalls_, there are _On a Hansom Cab_, _Two Glasses of Milk_, _On Matches and Things_. Few of them, it seems to me; are better than pretty good. That is hardly good enough. The essay is a stunt. Either the writer can balance his theme on the end of his nose or he can't. What with the various new jobs which are being created, some enterprising university should found a School of Censorship. It might, most fittingly, be a Sumner school, and the college yell without question will be "Carnal I yell! I yell carnal!" * * *